RadioVolta.org
Title
RADIO VOLTA, a project of the Philly IMC
Description
About Radio Volta
Radio Volta, the audio working group of the Philadelphia IMC, is an outgrowth of the webcast team that broadcasted over the "Internet waves" during the 2000 Republican National Convention. Named after Philadelphia anarchist Voltairine de Cleyre, we are an independent community-based collective of creative individuals, committed to airing challenging and nontraditional cultural, educational and news content that will raise awareness and encourage activism around pivotal social and economic justice issues. Pivotal to our mission is a desire to redefine what "news" is in people's daily lives. Rather than disempowering political performances, news should be of the protests and the struggles that our neighborhoods are engaged in on a day-to-day, month-to-month basis. Towards this end, covering protests and featuring the work of community organizations will make up a major chunk of our programming time in the future. This is a need that is particularly pronounced in Philadelphia--grassroots politics is not considered news to the editorial board of the
unless there is some sort of scandal. When one group asked why this was, they were told that the Inquirer did not cover "staged political events."
Webcasting offers a chance to circumvent the restrictions placed on public dissemination of ideas by the corporate media. Already the news programs created by some IMCs are being picked up by community radio stations across the country, challenging the stranglehold that corporate and NPR news has on the nation, and even challenging the formulaic tendences we are observing in Pacifica's coverage. In order to continue this movement, we need to empower more groups like ours -- starting from a grassroots, community-based perspective, but empowered by our participation in a larger anti-corporate movement to democratize the media. We are doing this not just as an exercise in our own powers of expression, but explicitly because we want to forge this ground.
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